Circling Back to Google Squared

You have to check out searches for Sushi Denver or Plumbers Denver as below. Damn. ”Category” specific property/value comparison. Where have we heard that before? Of course, Local Matters has had comparison as an offering to its platform forever, taking advantage of the structured data of its customers. It’s amazing how Google keeps deconstructing this space, picking apart what seem to be solid competitive differentiators.

I in fact did some local searches but the results were quite poor and didn’t write about them. But Michael’s right that a better and more refined version of Google Squared could fit nicely into local. Alternatively, as with Michael’s Local Matters example, Google could simply add a check box and then a grid view (a la shopping comparison engines) to existing local results.

Beyond what Dex was formerly doing with Local Matters, I’m sure there are other examples of what I’m talking about. However, LocalPrice comes to mind as an existing version of this:

Google doesn’t usually develop products (with the exception maybe of Maps and some stuff in mobile) that have more narrow use cases. So the company would want to see this work broadly across categories before integrating it into Google.com or Maps.